


the hanged man

by Dragunov



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-09-25
Packaged: 2017-12-12 14:27:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/812608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragunov/pseuds/Dragunov
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short crossover of the Dark Tower universe with characters Sebastian Moran and Jim Moriarty from Sherlock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sebastian Moran is standing in the screaming madness of a mist green thinny, and the thinny is eating him alive, and the thinny is him, the man in black, and the man in black is the thinny, whispering devil sweet seductive words in his ear, and screaming, mist, green and the man in black will kill him, eat him alive. And of course time and space have come together so that they can meet, because ka, because theirs is a fate you find again and again throughout all the worlds. He is the soldier, and the man in black is everything that contrived to make him so.
> 
> You will die for him, the rifle says. It does not judge. It, in fact, seems pleased.
> 
> “Aye,” Sebastian nods. “I know.”

August Moran is a man both tall, and long, long in the way he looks down at Sebastian from under his spectacles before smacking the boy with the back of his hand.

Sebastian swallows his blood.

But it spills from the corner of his mouth, like a babe sloppy with his mother’s milk.

This is remembering the face of his father, and it makes a man hard, what a gunslinger must be.

August has hair the color of desert sunset, redeeming fire. And Sebastian, hair the color of hardpan, where nothing grows. Both, eyes as light blue as sun scorch skies that do not rain, eyes that kill men who cross them.

Cort laughs at the look Sebastian casts. Cort is one-eyed, himself, but he sees all.

“You would kill us, boy?” Cort says, and he has Sebastian by his soiled hair - except wheat, you can grow wheat in the hardpan by watering it with piss, and it looks a lot like Sebastian’s hair. Sebastian is dragged to his feet. “We would like to see you try.”

He remembers this when he kills them - not them, he has not the pleasure of shooting out Cortland Andrus’ other eye, but gunslingers like them. Lying in wait with his belly to the burning earth, and he blows their heads off from far away. He remembers the face of his father, and licks the next bullet he loads for its metallic blood taste. Good-bye Gilead. Fuck the line of Arthur Eld and all his knights, with love.

The witch smells like shit.

This is a horse town. Horse towns tend to smell like shit, but in the love making hay sweat flesh full harvest of life way, whereas the witch smells like human excrement, wrongness and decay.

The witch holds it up to him, and Sebastian sees Maerlyn’s Grapefruit for the first time. He sees what it is like to see all, the badness of all, as Cort’s one eye saw all the badness of him; he sees a man in black, wearing a suit called Westwood. He is whistling a tune known in his world as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, with a star called Eastwood. His hands are covered in blood and Sebastian wants a taste.

The witch giggles and coos and pulls the Grapefruit away and she asks to see his long rifle and he snarls at her. She curses back.

He would love Maerlyn’s Grapefruit. He would murder her and he would steal it from her, were his soul not already possessed by a rifle and a man in black.

Before it belonged to him, the rifle belonged to a girl. A girl who would be hawk, gunslinger. He sees this, too, in the Grapefruit. She killed many men from the land of Ger, and at the start of this war she was scared, until she found she was good at the killing, good at the badness of it, eating snow to hide the human warmth of her breath, and she kills hundreds upon hundreds of these Ger-mans with her little hands, long rifle. She and Sebastian and the rifle become one monster, ugly. 

Jim Moriarty laughs when Sebastian Moran tells him this story, laughs like Cort, a challenge. The softness of Moriarty’s world disturbs Moran, with water that is always available and rooms that are able to resist the sun, and the softness of Moriarty’s stomach, so that the sharpness of his laugh comes as a surprise, and sharpness of his teeth as he tears Sebastian’s shredded lips to more shreds. He licks this man in black like he’d lick a bullet, for the metallic blood taste of him.

Midworld doesn’t want Moriarty but Moriarty opens a door to it anyway, wrenches the door off its hinges, because ka happens whether it is wanted or not, and Sebastian has never witnessed ka in a man like he has in Moriarty, who is desert storm.

“You’ve streaks of red in your hair,” Moriarty asks, writhing against him, rattlesnake.

Eyes like shadow at the edge of their firelight. 

“Blood.”

“Mmmmmmm,” Moriarty says. “Hhhhmmmm.”

Mor in the High Speech of Gilead, is a word which means to hang, and Moran is a hangman. August Hangman, execution hand of Steven Deschain, and Sebastian Hangman, his disgrace of a son. A family old as the ancient reign of Arthur Eld, and Sebastian the end of it; no little boy in great Gilead who will remember his face.

The tarot cards materialize in Moriarty’s overcoat. He shuffles them.

“Where did you get those?” Sebastian asks.

He grins. “Pick one.”

“No.”

The grin goes feral. “Pick one.”

Sebastian picks one.

“The Hanged Man.” Moriarty hisses, without seeing which card it is. It stands for betrayal.

“You gonna beg me to kill you, maggot?” Cort says, and spits on Sebastian’s broken body. “Save it. You know now you’re not worth a gunslinger’s bullet. Get up. Get up! Go, then.”

There are other worlds than these.

He leaves without a last look at his father’s face.

He makes certain in the years to come that the gunslingers waste many a bullet on him. He finds the long rifle, and becomes a sharpshooter.

They massacre a town together. For a month Moriarty preaches to the people, with his tarot cards, a man dressed in black speaking sweetly of other worlds, and he winds them and he binds them and he tightens them in such a knotted fury of ka that they come to Sebastian asking for the slaughter, for release. Asking to see the other worlds. Sebastian slits their throats one by one, and Moriarty strokes their hair shh-shh-shushing as they die. Then he arranges their bodies along the town hall’s big table so that they are all sitting on the same side. He sets the table with bread and wine.

This is hilarious to him. Sebastian is not sure of the joke.

He points to the strangeness of the clouds in the sky, how the lake of blood they leave behind flows like a river in the same direction.

“I’ve seen this,” he says. “In London.”

“Aye,” and Sebastian is wiping his knife but it won’t seem to clean. “Thar’d be the fucking Beam.”

“What happens if we follow it?”

Sebastian shrugs. 

“Shall we?”

Sebastian shrugs. “You like turtle soup, sai?”

Moriarty mmhmms. “I could.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is not consecutive or anything, I just got bored and wrote more in the universe and thought I might add it. you know me, what is storyline

He walks as if he were in all worlds at once, he walks, perhaps, as if he were in none at all. He walks as if he walks in his very own world, unbound. There is a Tower, there is a tree, there is a serpent circling the vastness, there is Jim Moriarty in black.

Sebastian was raised by the desert.

The desert taught him how to be a man more than any gunslinger in Gilead. Harden, the desert said, as he stumbled, or die, and so he became hard. He sold his soul to the devil-grass, he chewed it once and it taught him how to survive; it’s not the only plant in the desert, but it is the only plant that will burn, and devils do dance in his campfire at night and he nods, sleeping head in smoke, and someday he will bring them what they need. His soul.

Learn much about a man, Cort always said, in the shadow he casts, and the Morans tend to be tall, lanky sorts, with shadows long like the gallows. But the sun is different in the desert and Sebastian’s shadow is taller, longer, darker. His man in black has no shadow: he is shadow.

Sebastian Moran hates Jim Moriarty in a way, hates from him the moment they meet in the London world, because Sebastian has never loved, and he confuses the feeling for bondage; and it is, it is all the same. So he brings Moriarty to the desert because the desert can kill, because Sebastian can not seem to kill him, and when the snake bites Moriarty, Moran simply laughs, throws his back in blessed relief and laughs.

And Moriarty bites the snake back, and bites, and bites, and Sebastian stops laughing, and when he is finished he fashions a necklace of the spine which he hangs around Sebastian’s neck like fetters and his fingers are soft and cool and Sebastian knows he is a fool for thinking he could be free. As much a slave to him as to water, to his own shadow, and Jim, mouth smeared with snake blood, stares him down to his knees.

He hands Moriarty his long rifle, so that Moriarty stands holding his rifle and Sebastian licks the blood dripping under his chin like a dog, and Jim smiles like the earth sometimes splits to unknown depths, and groans, hoarse, “Good boy.”

He collapses, his body not breathing, his heart not beating, and Sebastian carries him across the desert, waits for him to wake. He is heavy in a way that does not strain Sebastian’s back but still makes him stoop. Finally he builds a fire of the devil-grass, and lays Moriarty down so that the smoke blows around him as funeral shroud. Sebastian watches the devil’s dance. Moriarty opens his eyes, unblinking, as a snake, eyes like unlucky dice, double life, and he sucks the dried blood from his lips and he looks at Sebastian.

"I’m hungry."

Sebastian nods. “I know a town. S’a long walk.”


End file.
